


tezeta (nostalgia)

by vowelinthug



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Trees, benign life experiences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 04:05:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14845386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vowelinthug/pseuds/vowelinthug
Summary: Steve Rogers is a terrible tourist, and a lousy house guest.Bucky Barnes waters his plants and tries his best.__set in that sweet spot between Black Panther and Infinity War, in a little valley in Wakanda





	tezeta (nostalgia)

**Author's Note:**

> title from a song by [Mulatu Astatke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy-v-FgiUD8)
> 
>  
> 
> hello i'm gemma, this is my first stucky fic :O

* * *

 

Steve has never seen Wakanda in the rain. The couple times he’s been, the sun had been near blinding, everything in bright, vivid detail. It had never been that sunny in Brooklyn that he could remember. It definitely hadn’t been that sunny in Germany. Or in D.C.

Wakanda in the sun shone. But Wakanda in the rain _sparkles_. Rivets of water splash over the lush canopies of trees when he’d crossed through the small opening in the barrier T’Challa had left for him. In the distance, he can see the homes of the cities glowing in the morning mist, and it all looked inexplicably warm, despite the chill of the wind and rain. Steve hasn’t thought of painting in a long time, but that’s probably because he hasn’t seen anything this colorful in awhile. The lavender grays and the deep blue-greens of the scene make his fingers twitch with inactivity.

“Leave that thing here,” says Okoye, sneering at the stolen jeep Steve is sitting in. “Looking at it makes my teeth hurt.”

Which is fair. Steve grabs his bag and steps out of the car, pulling his raincoat hood up. The vehicle Okoye jumps into hovers a few feet off the ground. It has no cover to protect it from the rain, but when Steve throws his duffel in and jumps on, he finds he’s no longer getting wet. It’s not even close to the weirdest thing Steve’s seen these last few years, but it’s one of the few weird things that hasn’t tried to kill him, so he likes it. A few men in official-looking outfits sit at the helm, and they don’t glance at him at all to make sure he’s steady before starting up the hovercraft.

Despite the dryness, Shuri has her umbrella opened, resting on her shoulder. Colorful lights dot the inside and wrap around the pole, making her seem even brighter than usual. “Captain Rogers,” she says, smiling widely. “We didn’t expect you for another couple of hours.”

“Sorry,” says Steve, lowering his hood. “I — made good time.”

Okoye snorts behind him, but says nothing.

“Well, my brother sends his apologies for not being able to meet you himself,” says Shuri with a shrug. “He has many kingly and boring things to attend to.”

“There’s no need to apologize.”

“There _isn’t_ ,” Okoye agrees fiercely.

The hovercraft glides easily over the slick grass as they drift seamlessly — away from the city, towards the base of the mountains. Without its lights, it feels like night, gloomy and unbearably cold.

“You have him _isolated?_ ” Steve asks, and then reminds himself to watch his damn tone, as Okoye’s grip tightens imperceptibly on her spear.

Shuri doesn’t seem to notice. “He asked for it. He said he’s spent enough time being looked at under a microscope.”

Steve closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. Despite everything that he’s learned, despite everything that happened the last few times he was with Bucky, in his mind he still refuses to reconcile it. When he thinks _Bucky_ , it takes him a moment to remember the long hair, the metal arm, the dead eyes, the lab rat in a glass box, the assassin on a bridge. He first thinks of the crooked smile, the terrible jokes, the bruised knuckles, the sweat smell under his arm Steve didn’t hate every time Bucky reeled him in by the shoulders. Sam told him it’s only going to make things worse for the both of them if he doesn’t stop remembering that guy first. Steve’s trying.

“So, he’s — all good now?” He opens his eyes. “He knows I’m coming?”

“He no longer has those triggers in his brain,” Shuri says carefully. “And it took him a little while to be convinced you should come. He — I told him, if my brother thought it safe for _me_ to be alone with him, you would be just fine as well.”

Steve shoots Okoye a look that says, _You really left her alone with him?_ And the look Okoye gives back clearly says, _Of course we didn’t, you idiot._

That, Shuri catches. “Well, _he_ didn’t have to know it wasn’t true. I think he’s just nervous to see you. He’s told me all about — you.”

Steve’s stomach jolts at that. He wants to know what Bucky has to say about him, about _them_. He wants to see it how Bucky saw it all, how he sees it now. He wants to know what’s got Shuri grinning like she is now. But Steve learned a long time ago, one of the first things he might have ever learned — there’s no sense in lingering forever on wants. “Did he?” he asks, his mouth dry.

“It was necessary for testing his cognitive retention,” Shuri says.

“She’s a gossip,” Okoye says.

They crest over a hill, and there, nestled in a small valley, is a large tree, a small pond, and a small house sitting on the edge of a forest. Warm light emits from the windows, and it’s too far to make out any details, the rain and fog obscuring most, but as Steve looks down, he sees a dark shadow move inside, flickering through the light like morse code. He feels like he’s frozen again, breathing around his heart lodged in his throat, just trying to decipher what it says.

It takes him a moment to realize the hovercraft has stopped moving. They’re still about fifty feet from the house. Shuri and Okoye are looking at him with polar opposite expressions.

“Go on, Captain Rogers,” says Shuri. “He’s expecting you.”

Steve leaps down off the craft, and instantly he’s drenched, pulling his hood up a second too late. “Thank you, Princess Shuri,” he says, grabbing his duffel and slinging it over his shoulder. “For everything.”

Shuri shrugs, looking pleased. “It was fun,” she says. “Like a Cat’s Cradle, but with neurons and the risk of permanent brain damage. I’ll let T’Challa know you’ve arrived safely. I’m sure he’ll be by soon enough.”

Okoye says something to the pilots, and the craft speeds away, leaving Steve alone in the rain.

He sinks a little into the soft grass as he makes his way down to the house. He manages not to slip as the hillside steepens, which is what he tells himself to excuse the jog he makes to the front door.

He only gets to knock once before Bucky opens the door.

They stare at each other. The rain continues to fall.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says, blinking rainwater out of his eyes.

“Hey, Steve,” Bucky says, equally quiet, staring. Then he tears his gaze away from Steve’s face and looks at the rest of him, stepping back. “Christ, you’re soaked. Get inside, would you?”

Steve’s been running at full speed for the last thirty hours. He’d gotten the call from Shuri (“Oh, yeah, he’s all good now. No worries. You can come visit whenever you want.”) just as they’d been leaving Baalbek, and with only the faintest word to Sam and Natasha, and remembering his forged passport at the last second, he’d torn off across the country on foot. The flight from Beirut had been fraught, his intense need to stay inconspicuous warring with his desire to jump on the wing of the plane and speed up the engines by hand. And of course, there’s no major airport in Wakanda. The closest one that had been leaving on time got him to Bamako, and he’d been across Mali and well into Burkina Faso before Sam had called and said, for fuck’s _sake_ , just find a damn _car._ Which he had (although not until he’d hit Niger) and he’d been moving like a hunted animal the whole time, never sleeping or stopping, only to reach this tiny house in a small, unnamed valley, and it takes every last ounce of strength he has — both God-given and Erskine-given — just to walk those few steps inside.

“Sorry,” says Bucky, shutting the door behind him. “Manners must have been the first thing I forgot.”

Steve doesn’t know if he’s allowed to laugh, so he just stands there and drips.

“I wasn’t expecting you for another few hours,” Bucky continues after a moment, scratching at the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” says Steve. “I — rushed.”

They stand in silence.

Steve’s eyes keep sliding over Bucky like oil, refusing to stick, so he looks around the house instead. It looks a lot like the rest of Wakanda, an odd mix of futuristic tech and old world style. A high, thatched ceiling, a sparse kitchen with shiny appliances, a dark flat-screen television on a wall, a beautifully beaded blanket on the back of a slouching sofa. The wood floors are scuffed but clean, with wicker mats of green and yellow straw under the living room’s only lamp and only table. Pretty and interesting art covers the walls, hung up in mismatched wooden frames, but Steve can’t imagine Bucky picking them out himself. But between everything in the room is some kind of potted plant or fern or vine wrapping itself around something else, and he hopes Bucky picked those out, because they make the whole room smell earthy and nice. Off to the side of the kitchen is a bathroom. There’s another door beside the kitchen that’s closed.

“Hell, Steve,” Bucky says, somewhat desperately. “You could take your coat off or something.”

“Sorry,” Steve says, dumping his duffel on the floor and quickly shimmying out of his rain jacket. He holds onto it stupidly until Bucky approaches slowly to take it out of his hands.

With him closer, Steve can’t look anywhere else. “You look good, Buck,” he says, because he does. He can’t remember ever seeing Bucky in color before, but the dark red of his loose shirt and trousers give his skin a healthy shine, and the blue shawl tied around his left shoulder and side brings out the brightness in his eyes. His hair is down, brushed and washed and away from his face.

Bucky smiles, almost too quick for Steve to catch. “Thanks,” he says, moving away to hang up Steve’s jacket.

That’s when Steve notices that Bucky is barefoot, and his heart seizes up as he tries not to cry. This isn’t like the shock and horror of seeing Bucky in the middle of a fight, with sweat and smoke and blood burning in his eyes. This isn’t like the desperation and eagerness of finding Bucky in a shithole apartment in Romania, after hunting down his best friend for months, because he’d known his best friend was hiding from him. It’s such a small, insignificant thing, the sight of his pale, vulnerable feet padding on the soft wood, but Steve can’t look away. A man like the Winter Soldier would never go barefoot. A man like that always has to be ready to run.

“You look good, too,” Bucky says, turning back to him. “Apart from that schmutz on your face.”

It’s a classic Winifred Barnes line, one uttered many times that summer when Bucky was fourteen and valiantly trying to grow a mustache. The words cut through the noose he hadn’t realized was around his neck and he’s laughing even as his knees crumple.

Bucky’s there to catch him, even one-armed as he is. It’s more like a hug than anything, especially the way Steve clings to him.

“Alright, Jesus, calm down,” Bucky mumbles into his hair, shuffling him over to the couch. His hand is flat on Steve’s back, rubbing up and down. “God, your heart’s racing like it used to. Have you eaten? When was the last time you ate?”

Steve doesn’t answer, because he’s buried in Bucky’s neck and he’s not getting up until he absolutely has to. This has been denied him so many times.

Bucky gets them sitting, and at first Steve thinks he’s going to let go, or keep nagging him nervously, but in the end Bucky just holds on, too, silent and shaking.

Eventually, they both pull back at the same time, though they don’t exactly let go. Bucky’s smile is not so quick to leave this time, once again giving him a look over. “I’m not kidding,” he says, pinching the scruff on Steve’s face. “Whose bright idea was this?”

“Natasha’s,” he says honestly. “It’s supposed to help me blend in.” He’s not a fan of it, not just in part because Sam looked better with a beard. Nat keeps yelling at him whenever she catches him trimming it, and since she’s suffering through being a blonde, which she loathes, it’s the least he can do. She’s not going to be happy until he has a full Ulysses S. Grant, though.

“Trust me,” says Bucky. “It ain’t working.”

Steve laughs again, and even to himself it sounds exhausted and just this side of manic.

“God, Rogers,” Bucky says fondly, gripping his neck. “You’re a mess. When _was_ the last time you ate?”

“I think I ate something on the plane,” Steve lies.

Bucky sighs, standing up. His hand lingers on Steve’s shoulders before heading into the kitchen. Steve watches for a moment before he sinks back into the couch. That’s the thing about being a kind of thing that Steve is — he can do the impossible, stuff normal people just _can’t_ do. He can do them, but he sure as shit feels them afterwards. His _fingernails_ feel tired.

Bucky comes back to the couch with a tray of fruit and cheese, a loaf of bread stuffed under his arm. He sets it all down between them and gestures to Steve to help himself. All he can manage is sticking a couple grapes in his mouth.

They fall silent again. There’s seventy years and no words between them. There’s so much he wants to ask Bucky, so much he needs to know, every horrifying, excruciating detail, the same way he’s needed to know everything about Bucky since the time they were twelve and Fannie Gumpertz had pulled Bucky behind the playground and showed him the color of her underpants. There’s nothing about Bucky Steve doesn’t find integral.

But there’s too much Bucky shouldn’t have to say, and too much Steve can’t bring himself to ask. It reminds him of just after Azzano, when they’d finally gotten a moment to sit down, just the two of them, and he’d had to answer Bucky’s ten thousand questions that were essentially just different versions of “What the _fuck_ did you do, Steve?” But when it came time to Steve asking Bucky about what he’d gone through, not just in that HYDRA lab but everything before that, too, the fighting, the battles, the war — Bucky had clammed up, his eyes lost and hunted, and refused to speak on any of it.

Steve remembers what he did, then, to get rid of that look on his face. He’d told Bucky every single horrifyingly embarrassing story of his time as the U.S. Army’s greatest war bond salesman. It had taken Steve a while to be able to look Bucky in the eye after that, but the way Bucky had almost made himself sick laughing had been worth it.

He hasn’t put on a show in over seventy years, but some things you don’t forget. Because they’re too deeply ingrained. Because of the trauma.

“Before, we were in Baalbek,” Steve starts, helping himself to some bread, “but before that, we were in Jordan. We were there doing… other stuff, but Sam had wanted to see Al-Khazneh. It was really beautiful, you would like it. It reminded me of that chapel in the middle of Green-Wood, you remember? Where we had the service for my ma? It probably doesn’t look anything like it, but it gave me the same feeling, I guess.”

“I remember,” Bucky says quietly.

“Yeah, well, after Al-Khazneh, we went and had dinner in the home of some locals,” Steve continues. “Nat did most of the talking, and she’s really friendly when she wants to be. Sam’s better with Arabic than I am, but since I don’t know anything, that’s not really saying much. He says he can only understand if he’s paying attention very hard. And we’d just… had a busy couple of days, so we’re tired as hell as we’re dragged to this little village outside Petra.

“And everyone is smiling and piling more food onto our plates, and we’re just nodding and smiling and eating it all.”

“Oh, no,” Bucky says, starting to grin. “What did you eat?”

“Some things, I’ll never know,” Steve admits. “They really take the policy of _waste not_ to heart, it reminded me of being a kid. I found out eventually I ate the eyeballs of multiple different species of bird and fish, but I only managed to get a few bites of a very popular dish Nat just called _lamb fries_. Which, of course, turned out to be deep-fried lamb testicles.”

Bucky chokes on a piece of cheese. “You _didn’t_.”

Steve hums, grinning. “But the only reason I just ate a few,” he says, “was because Sam had been hoarding the whole plate of them the entire night.”

Bucky stares at him for a second, before throwing his head back and laughing. He falls back against the couch, nearly knocking over their fruit plate, his hand coming up to cover his eyes.

Steve feels like crying again. “I mean, in reality,” he says over Bucky’s laughter, “he probably only ate the testicles of like — five, maybe six sheep. But when we found out, he spent the next ten hours puking up everything he’d eaten in the last four months. I’ve never seen Natasha look so disgusted with us.” Steve starts laughing too, at the memory of her face. “She was about this close to defecting back to Russia. And now Sam pays _very_ close attention to whatever anyone says around food.”

The couch shakes from Bucky’s laughter, his hand still covering his eyes. It’s probably not that funny of a story, even though he knows Bucky and Sam feel some kind of way about each other. It’s too dumb, kinda lewd but not really, the kind of stupid shit they used to joke about before a war had robbed them of stupid shit, when they were too broke and Steve was too sick to do anything but skip stones in the East River and listen to the cadence of each other’s voices.

“What,” Bucky gasps, finally looking back at Steve. He’s still laughing, but he manages to say, “What did they _taste_ like?”

Steve knows what answer he’s looking for, and really, there’s no reason not to give it to him. “A little salty,” he says, and laughs with Bucky when he falls backwards again and crows, holding his stomach tight, so Steve can see every bit of delight on his face.

He manages to tell Bucky every ridiculous thing he’s managed to do in between fighting and bouts of heroism — what Natasha and Sam called Operation Small Talk. They’d realized Steve had absolutely _nothing_ in his life he could casually chat about with someone over dinner, and even though they’d been running for their lives while simultaneously getting rid of terrorist cells and gun smugglers and HYDRA bases, they’d been working on giving him some “Benign Life Experiences.” He’d thought it pointless, the idea of him ever having a casual dinner with someone seems almost insane at this point. But the things he wound up doing — eating lamb testicles, learning to belly dance at a Thai kathoey club, becoming a figure of worship on an island outside of New Zealand, or getting himself banned from the Icelandic Phallological Museum — hardly qualify as “Benign Life Experiences.”

He tells them to Bucky all the same, even as the day wears on and his exhaustion sets up a permanent home inside his bones. He just can’t seem to shut the hell up.

 

* * *

 

Steve wakes up with a start, reaching for a shield that hasn’t been there in a long time. He blinks up at the ceiling, disoriented. Somewhere, music is playing, unfamiliar and low. Outside, it’s still dark, but a different kind than it’d been earlier. An evening dark, not a thunderstorm dark. He must have only been sleeping a little while, because he doesn’t feel rested at all.

The music stops just as Steve sits up. Bucky’s coming out of his his bedroom when Steve looks over. He's holding a plastic watering can.

“Hey,” he says easily. He’s no longer barefoot. “I was just about to wake you. You passed right out in the middle of telling me about a cannibal you almost wed.”

“Oh,” says Steve. “That’s too bad. I think I’ve forgotten how that one ends.”

Bucky just grins, setting the can down on the table. It sounds empty. “You up for a walk? I don’t really have much other food, and there’s a great little place I’ve been to a few times, not far from here.”

“They got lamb fries?”

“Only if you ask nicely.”

Steve could honestly do with another eighteen hours of rest, but he’s slept before while Bucky had been out in the world for so long, all by himself, and he doesn’t want to do that again.

He grabs his jacket before they leave, but the rain has tapered off for the night. The air is thick with humidity, sweat coating every inch of his skin after walking around just a few minutes.

Bucky leads him parallel to where the city is, taking him the long way around. They walk a path through high trees, beside a thin, winding stream. Steve would think it would feel even more hot and claustrophobic, surrounded on all sides by thick greenery, but it’s not so bad. Wet leaves brush against their faces as they walk, cool and caressing. It reminds Steve of his mother trying to cool him off during the worst of his fevers.

They can’t walk side by side, but Steve’s content to watch Bucky’s back as he leads them through the forest. He keeps brushing his long hair off his neck, the soft strands sticking to the sweat at the corner of his jaw.

Bucky doesn’t want to talk about what he’s been through, what he’s done, but he seems much calmer than he’d been before, and is more than happy to talk about Wakanda.

“Have you met the Dora Milaje yet?” Bucky’s saying. “I’ve only really seen them at a distance, but they sure are something. Like an entire army of Peggy Carters, all of them beautiful and deadly and wanting absolutely nothing to do with me.”

“What?” Steve interrupts. “Come on, _one_ of ‘em must —”

Bucky makes a sound, looking over his shoulder at Steve. “Nah, but I haven’t really asked. If you can already see the _no_ in their eyes before they even finish turning to face you, there’s no need to risk the humiliation.”

“Maybe your memory isn’t all back,” Steve says. “I think I said the exact same thing to you all throughout 1939. And ‘38. And ‘37…”

Bucky’s all teeth. “I remember,” he says.

Almost a hundred years of life, in the strange new world he’s awoken to, where impossible things happen every minute of every day, with everyone around him saying and doing new and wonderful and unbelievable things, things he never could have imagined in his wildest and most fanciful dreams, all of the magnificent and extraordinary that Steve has learned and seen and _heard_ — and none of it compares to Bucky saying those two words. I remember.

Bucky sighs, looking up at the halo of trees overhead. “I love it here,” he says.

Steve watches him looking. Christ, he really hopes it’s the exhaustion of running across two continents that’s making him want to weep and never stop. “You were never one for nature,” he says, just to say something, just to stop watching the sweep of Bucky’s hair between his shoulder blades. “Used to say you were a city boy through and through.”

Bucky turns to him again, scowling. “I liked nature! I did that summer at Surprise Camp Lake, remember?”

Steve remembers. It had been the worst summer of his life. “You hated it. Said it was too quiet away from the city.”

Bucky stops. The scowl is gone, his eyes warm. “It’s not quiet here. Listen.”

Steve listens. It comes to him gradually — the rush of the stream, water sliding over rock; the rustle of different textures brushing together in the small breeze, ridged leaves against rough bark against grass against grass against earth; the call and hum and song of birds and crickets overhead; the rumble and scitter and growl of other things in the bushes all around. With his hearing, the same as Bucky’s hearing, he also hears the chatter of young voices, small feet dancing over stone, and beyond that, the mixed melody of music and bustle and people of a living city.

Bucky smiles at whatever he sees on Steve’s face and starts them moving again. They reach a clearing where the path diverges. Bucky’s about to lead them left, but he stops when he sees some kids playing around a large boulder on the opposite side of the water.

He whistles at them, and when the kids see them, they all explode with delight, waving frantically. Some of the smaller ones splash in the water, as though ready to run to him, but stop when he and Steve wave back. Two of the kids — a boy and a girl — stand on top of the boulder, point at Bucky, and start howling at him like wolves.

Bucky rolls his eyes, shooing them with his hand before turning back to the path.

“What was that about?” Steve asks, catching up.

“Nothing,” says Bucky. “They raise their kids to be smartasses here.”

They exit the thicket of trees and the marketplace is uphill, though not as steep as the valley of Bucky’s house. It’s a little muddy and they both slide on their way up. At one point, Bucky nearly falls outright, hand outstretched to catch himself, even as Steve catches him first. He tugs him upright by the back of his shirt.

Bucky laughs. “Guess I shouldn’t have taken you this way.”

“It’s fine,” Steve says, eventually letting go. He watches Bucky continue to walk, noticing now the awkward tilt of his body. “Hey, are they working on getting you a new arm?”

“What?”

“I’m sure the princess could make you one,” Steve says. “Hell, it’d probably be ten times better than your old one. I could ask T’Challa, if you want.”

“No, I —” Bucky faces him, and he looks steadier than he had a moment ago, or maybe Steve just feels more off-kilter. “They offered. I turned them down.”

“What? Why?”

He sighs, heading back up. When they reach the marketplace, he says, “I don’t want it. It’s not — It’s not _me._ ”

Steve gets that, he _does._ But he knows how hard it is to move through life when your body wants nothing more than to make every step more difficult for you. “But wouldn’t it be easier with another limb? Even just a simple one?”

Bucky looks down at himself. They’re in the shadow of a building, and night has fallen, but the streets are illuminated with a fantastic array of open flames and neon, both burning different colors that flash onto Bucky’s face. His whole body is stiff, just one motion short of a salute. “This is easier,” he says, staring at his only hand. “Trust me. This is easier.”

It’s hard to tell if Bucky looks smaller without the addition of the metal arm or whatever the hell else HYDRA was doing to bulk him up. With the lights and sounds and smells all around them, Steve feels like he’s looking back into the past again, that the streets of Wakanda could easily be the Stark Expo. It’s all bright but a little worn, like a picture held too many times.

Sam’s voice in his ear, telling him to stop trying to see the old Bucky when he’s got the one he’s got right in front of him. It’s hard to hear it, when this Bucky looks just as much like home here in 2017 as he did in 1942.

“Alright, Buck,” Steve says, clapping him on the shoulder. “And if you need any jars opened, just ask.”

Bucky huffs a laugh, shaking his head. “You’re still a punk, Rogers.” But his body loosens again, right under Steve’s hand.

They get a lot of looks as they walk through the marketplace, but Steve assumes they’re all for him. Bucky weaves them through the crowds without care, his chin lifted, but he moves like a man with a mission. He’s not racing, but he’s not letting Steve stop to take it all in, either.

The restaurant is not very far into the marketplace, anyway. Steve wonders if that’s the reason Bucky comes here a lot. It’s quiet indoors, but that could be because most people seem to be eating out on the street, in the brief respite from the rain. There’s only one family inside, two women chatting, ignoring their kids bouncing around on their chairs and snatching a hologram toy back and forth. On the walls are works of art, done by the same painter, all showing the same person, who appears to be a very muscular athlete and champion of some sport Steve doesn’t know. The place smells strongly of roasted garlic, which surprisingly makes Steve stomach rumble. He hadn’t been all that hungry until he’d stepped inside.

“I was just going to say,” Bucky says as they wait to sit, “you’ll like this place. But I’ve just realized we’ve never eaten together in a place or time where they actually flavored things.”

“Well, you know me,” Steve says. “Apparently, I’ll eat just anything you put in front of me.” Then he thinks about it. “So long as it isn’t boiled cabbage.”

Bucky’s face pinches “Or liver loaf.”

“Or chipped beef.”

“Or prune pudding.”

“ _God_.” Steve winces. “Of all the things you had to remember.”

“I guess even Soviet brainwashing can’t erase the taste of prune pudding.”

Steve wants to take Bucky by the shoulders and shake him. After Azzano, he used to joke about him and Steve both going from Brooklyn street rats to German lab rats, that the shit Zola injected him with tasted better than their regulation MREs, that he — like Steve — had grown over a foot, too, just not anywhere you could tell from looking at him with his clothes on. He’d tell terrible jokes about terrible things, so no one would bring them up to him first. And if anyone wanted to question him about the things he’d say, he could just roll his eyes and go, “Aw, hell, I’m only _kidding._ ” On the one hand, this old Bucky habit is a good sign. On the other hand, Steve wants to take Bucky by the shoulders and _shake him._

“Bucky Barnes,” says a warm voice behind them. They turn to see a tall woman leaning on a broom, wet leaves still clinging to the end. “And a guest! Is this the one you were telling me about yesterday?”

“Uh, yes?” Bucky says. “Who else would it be?”

“Hmm,” she says, brushing by and cocking her head for them to follow. “Well, when I _asked_ you yesterday if your friend was handsome, you wouldn’t tell me. But this is not a man _anyone_ would have to think twice about to answer that.”

“Aw, c’mon, Meka.” He shoots Steve a quick look over his shoulder, face red. “We don’t have to eat here, y’know.”

“No.” Meka sits them away from the noisy children. “You promised me the first tourist in Wakanda would eat at _my_ place first. You swore, on Garando’s life.” She nodded at the portrait hanging over the table, of Garando, apparently, kneeling in a river in just a sports jersey (a convenient splash of water in place to keep the painting family-restaurant friendly) holding a long staff in one hand and a black and white ball in the other. He smiles benignly down at them.

“Yeah, okay,” Bucky says, “but I still don’t know who that is.”

Meka clicks her tongue. “You still have so much to learn,” she says, before turning to Steve. “It’s very nice to meet you. I’m Meka, and this is my place.”

“Thank you,” he says, smiling. “I’m Steve.”

Meka looks at Steve, then pointedly looks back up at Garando, then pointedly back at Steve, then back at Bucky with a raised eyebrow.

“Can we just,” Bucky says, pained, “get the menus. Please.” 

She lingers on him for another moment before placing the menus on the table, patting Steve on the shoulder and walking back into the kitchen. When she’s gone, Bucky buries his face in his hand. “Christ, I forgot about _fucking_ Garando.”

Steve grins at Bucky. “She seems nice.”

Bucky scowls at him. “She’s lucky her food tastes good. This guy gives me the fucking creeps.” He nods to Garando.

“He’s like Babe Ruth or something?” Steve asks. “What sport?”

“All of them, I think.” He lowers his voice. “From what I’ve gathered, he’s also been dead for twenty years. She’s still a big fan. I’ve been advised not to ask about him unless I’ve got ten hours to spare.”

Meka comes back with water, and takes their order, which she just yells over her shoulder into the kitchen. Steve had intended to just get whatever Bucky ordered, unable to read the menu, but then Bucky orders a bit of everything for them to share.

Before she leaves, Meka holds up a slim silver box and says, “Can I get a picture of you, Steve? The first tourist in Wakanda is eating in _my_ restaurant and I want proof.”

“Oh.” Steve blinks. “I mean. Sure. C’mon, Buck.”

Meka steps back, and Steve and Bucky awkwardly lean over the table. It’s just the two of them and Garando in the water, and he’s always hated getting his picture taken, but for the first time in his whole life, the smile feels natural.

The camera flashes, and instantly a shining photo slides out the end, crystal clear and colorful. Meka drops it on the table and hands Steve a silver pen. “Could you sign it now? I want to put it on the wall, like they do in American movies.”

Steve asks her to spell her name, and then writes, _Meka, Thanks for having me! —Steve_. He takes a look at them in the photo, and thinks it’s about the nicest picture of himself he’s ever seen. Those old photos he used to take with fans were the first time he’d ever smiled for a picture in his life, and he’d always thought he looked like a mannequin, or a painted billboard. There hadn’t been any real reason to smile, back then. But this picture is the not like that.

And Buck. Every photo he’s seen of Bucky is him young and unknowing, which are too painful for him to hold onto. Or from surveillance footage, blurred with movement or out of focus, or case studies from experiments that Steve ultimately burned. But Bucky looks like — Bucky, here. So, effortlessly perfect. Even Garando looks good in it.

“Hey, can I get a copy of this?” he asks Meka.

She hesitates, likely thinking of Wakanda’s secrecy laws, which are mostly still in effect.

“I’m not gonna put it on the internet,” Steve says. “I’m kind of a fugitive from justice anyway.”

“...Oh,” says Meka. Then, she presses a button on the back of her camera, and another copy slides out. She looks at Bucky. “You want one, too?”

Bucky hasn’t even properly seen it, but he nods. And when she hands him a copy, he stares at it for a long time.

Steve looks down at his for a moment before sliding it into his passport he keeps in his jacket. “So. I’m the first tourist? Isn’t that you?”

“Nah,” says Bucky, still staring at the photo. “I’m the first ex-pat. It’s not nearly as exciting.” A funny look grows on Bucky’s face and stays there, even after he puts his photo away.

“What is it?” Steve asks.

“No, it’s nothing.” Bucky’s smile is weak.

Steve wants to press, but there’s a million different things to choose from that could be bothering Bucky, and he’s not sure any of them are wise to bring up in public.

They talk shit for a little while, quietly cracking jokes about the other Garando paintings whenever Meka isn’t nearby. It feels like they’re floating on the surface of something  — something deep and dark and terrifying, like the ice, like the mind, like the Potomac. Steve knows he’ll have to go down there eventually — it’s what he _does_ — but he’s content in this moment to stay adrift. It’s the nicest evening he’s had since 1941.

Meka needs two other waiters to bring them all the food Bucky orders. Beautiful, aromatic plates cover every inch of the table. Steve can’t recognize any of it but it all smells amazing. He piles some of everything onto his plate and digs in. He’s about halfway finished before he realizes everything Bucky ordered is vegetarian, and pre-cut so they only need the forks on the table.

He’s helping himself to seconds when a thought occurs to him. “Uh. Do they accept…” He trails off, feeling stupid. “...non-Wakandan money?”

Bucky snorts, swallowing at a normal pace. “Don’t worry, it’s my treat.”

He used to hold jobs a lot longer than Steve ever could. But whenever he used to pay for Steve, it had never been such a big, lavish meal like this. It had been the bare necessities, things any man should be able to provide for his damn self, and Bucky’s kindness grated away at him for years. But this, this feels like a _treat_. He grins. “You got a job, Buck?”

Bucky shrugs, not looking at him. “A neighbor of mine — well. They live about a mile away, but they’re still my closest neighbors, I think. S’raz — he’s the head of the household — he broke his arm. He got all fixed up, ‘course, but he’s getting on in his years and they don’t want him to push himself unnecessarily. Fortunately, I happen to have a spare arm that works pretty well.”

“That’s great,” Steve says sincerely. “It’s a farm?”

Bucky nods. “I help with the, uh, goats. Sheep. You know, they got a couple other animals too. I throw bales of hay around, try to be useful. They’re getting ready for a harvest.” He shrugs again, still not looking at Steve.

“That’s really great,” Steve says again, because Bucky’s acting like he doesn’t _know_ how great it is. “What do they—”

“I love it here, Steve,” Bucky interrupts. “In Wakanda.”

Steve shuts his mouth. Bucky’s looking at him now, lips pressed tight. “I know,” he says eventually.

“I don’t want to leave here,” Bucky says quickly. “I want to stay.”

Steve blinks. Then he throws down his fork onto his plate. “Who’s saying you have to go?” he demands. “Was it T’Challa? I can go talk to —”

“No!” Bucky’s staring at him with wide eyes. “I — Shuri said I could stay however long I liked.”

“Oh.” Now Steve’s staring. “Good.” Tentatively, he picks up his fork again, still a little confused.

Bucky doesn’t start eating. “So then what are you doing here?”

Steve opens his mouth. Then, he closes it. Too many answers, none of them _right_ , press against the back of his teeth, trapped in his throat. Finally, all he can think to say is, “I heard you were better, and I wanted to see you.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, frowning. “That’s it?”

Steve frowns, too. “What else?”

He looks like he’s thinking hard about something, debating whether to say it. He’d had that same look on his face the first time Steve ever told him he’d wanted to join the army. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Buck.”

“You know why I’m staying here,” he says slowly. “But do you know why you’re going?”

Steve blinks. “What?”

“You’re a _fugitive_ from _justice_ ,” Bucky repeats. “But why? Why are you still running?”

“Because… I’m a fugitive from justice? If I stop running, they’ll catch me.”

“I _mean_ ,” Bucky says, pushing his plate away. “Why are you still _fighting_ ? What are you _doing_ out there? _Why?_ ”

“I got a job to do,” Steve says, and suddenly he doesn’t want to meet Bucky’s eyes. “It’s important.”

“But for how long?” Bucky demands. “How _long_ do you keep having to do this? You only enlisted for a few years, goddammit! Didn’t you ever see yourself doing anything else at the end of the war?”

He had thought about it. Before the serum, his only life plan had been surviving to the next day. Afterwards, with the whole world opened, he’d been overwhelmed at the possibilities. He’d thought about staying in the military, making it a career. He’d thought about going into law enforcement. He’d thought about doing art. Senator Brandt had tried to convince him to go into politics, but Steve hadn’t had the heart to tell him he was a socialist. He went from being able to do nothing, to being able to do anything. He’d thought about it, sure.

And then Bucky’s hand had slipped off a broken rail, and he’d disappeared into the snow, and then Steve had only thoughts about the fight. “People are counting on me now,” he says instead. “I’m supposed to just turn my back on them?”

“Yes!” Everyone in the restaurant turns to look at them. Bucky lowers his voice, face pink, but mostly with anger. “Christ, Steve! The world is _shit_. It always has been and it always will be. Don’t you realize, every time you’re turned to help someone, there are thousands of other people suffering that you have to turn your back on? That’s just how it is, because you can’t be everywhere at once, can you? You’re either gonna go crazy this way or just _die—_ ” He stops.

He’s right, which is what pisses Steve off the most. Because he hasn’t thought about his mission since the minute Bucky opened his door, he’d been too damn _happy_ , and now his mission is all he can think about. Everyone out there in trouble, and he gets to sit here, having a nice dinner. Bucky’s right, because Steve thinks he might _already_ be crazy, the way his blood trembles under his skin with the need to _run_. He knows Bucky’s right, but he’s wrong too.

“I thought about… giving it up, once,” Steve admits. “And then everything got so much worse, and then —” _You_ , he doesn’t say. “I can’t just sit out when I know I can do good.”

“You can do _good_ things anywhere, without running into the battle all the time!”

 “ _What?_ What am I gonna do, huh? Collect scrap metal in my little red wagon?”

Bucky falls back against his chair, staring at Steve in amazement. He shakes his head, laughing unhappily. “So this is still about you trying to prove something, Stevie? What are you trying to prove? To _who?_ ”

“No!” Christ, his voice sounds small to him. It sounds like scuffing metal trash cans, like fingernails scratching on dirty brick. “This is about me being useful! What else am I made for?”

The sad smile drops drops from Bucky’s face. Now he just looks sad. “That’s what they used to tell me, you know,” he says softly. “They told me I had a use, too.”

Steve flinches, feeling like he might throw up all this food. He used to get sick all the time. The only time he’d ever thrown up _after_ getting the serum had been that first day, in Times Square. Fury had stood next to him awkwardly, an entire SHIELD battalion cutting off a block of 43rd Street as they waited for him to finish heaving. Fury had said some things never do change, as it was still pretty commonplace to puke in Times Square.

Sickness in a strong body feels no different than sickness in a weak one, he’d discovered.

“It’s not the same,” he says.

“Okay, Steve. I know—” Bucky cuts himself off to sigh. “I knew this was a pointless conversation even before I started it. I know you. I just want you to think about who’s helping _you,_ too.”

“I have backup out there,” Steve says.

“That’s not what I mean,” says Bucky. “And I think you—”

“Is everything alright?” Meka asks, suddenly beside them. She’s holding a jug to refill their water, even though their glasses are both full.

“Everything’s fine,” Steve says automatically. He smiles weakly. “The food is delicious, thank you.”

She hums, one hand on her hip. “I know it is,” she says. “You know, a lot of us debate about whether it’s smart to open up our borders to other people. We may not know everything that goes on out there, but we know enough. We know you fight too much.”

“It’s not that kind of fight,” Bucky assures her. “It’s an ‘I’m concerned for you’ argument.”

“Oh.” She straightens. “That’s okay, then. We do that here too.”

Then she adds, “But we don’t do it in my restaurant, so keep it down,” before wandering back into the kitchen.

When Steve looks back at Bucky, he’s eating again, focusing hard on his meal, so Steve picks up his fork again. He can’t taste anything properly, though. The bitterness of adrenaline coats his tongue like a layer of ash. His heart won’t stop racing.

 _I’m concerned for you_ , he’d said, like Steve is the one who’d been brainwashed. Like Steve’s the one who’d been tortured. Concerned, like Steve isn’t the one who’s just been fucking _asleep_ all while _Bucky—_

He’s never had a panic attack before, at least never in a time when they had that name for it. But he’s seen one recently. They’d been flying out of Luang Prabang when Sam had awoken from a doze screaming. They’d been hiding in the cargo hold of the plane, so silence had been vital, and Steve had to muffle him with both hands to quiet him down while Natasha had to control his arms and soothe him. Steve had felt so guilty about it afterwards, more so when Sam had told him it was alright.

He’d said he’d almost been asleep, and suddenly he’d become hyper aware of the fact they were moving through the air. He’d suddenly felt the weightlessness, felt careening through altitudes with no control, just how he’d been that night with Riley. Being Falcon gave Sam back his control, he said, but he’s no longer a big fan of flying the regular way.

His heart is racing now like Sam’s had been, when he’d pressed his whole self against him in an effort to keep him silent. Steve’s not screaming yet, but it’s there, waiting patiently for the right moment. He feels out of control, tumbling through space, and he needs to do something, say _something_ — when a tiny holographic toy flies through the air and lands in a bowl on their table.

They both stare at it.

It’s a little silver ball, with a holographic, realistic-looking moon, complete with every nook and crater, projecting out of it, rotating lazily in their extra serving of rice.

Gently, Bucky puts his fork down and picks up the toy.

The two kids are still on the other side of the room, watching them apprehensively. Their moms have yet to notice their toy has disturbed another table.

Bucky wipes it gently on a napkin, then holds it up to his face so it’s in place of his eye. He mugs at the kids, the light from the toy making his hair silver on the edges. Only one of the kids smiles at the faces he makes, the other nervously looking at their mothers. Bucky examines the toy for a second, then with his thumb and forefinger, pinches the little inner ball until it squeezes right out of his fingers and across the restaurant. It doesn’t follow a normal trajectory, though. It whirls and spins in the air, dancing between ceiling lights, sweeping low to weave between chair legs, bouncing off Garando paintings before it lands on an empty table three over from the kids, rolling behind a salt shaker. Their faces light up as they rush to find it.

Bucky’s face is also alight, watching them. When he turns back to Steve, the light isn’t gone, even if his smile gets sad again.

“Aw, Hell,” he says, going back to his food with a shake of the head. “Can you quit it with that look? I’m sorry I brought it up, okay?”

“Buck…”

“I mean it.” Bucky’s smile changes. He looks like he does in their photograph. It’s a realness that makes the pace of Steve’s heart slow, watching the easy way Bucky uses the back end of his fork to push his hair away from his face. Effortlessly perfect. “I’m just glad you’re here,” Bucky says, and it’s like Steve’s engines have shut down, sudden but not unexpected, and he finds himself just able to simply drift to a comfortable stop on the side of a road.

There are no roads leading to Bucky’s home, he’d noticed. But here in Wakanda, there doesn’t seem to be much need for them, anyway. 

 

* * *

 

Steve wakes up with another horrible start. He stares at the ceiling again, heart pounding. He’s not sure what woke him up this time, not remembering any bad dreams, until another loud bang of thunder claps outside, clueing him in.

He looks to the nearest window, half expecting to see Thor. His internal clock tells him it’s morning, but the sky outside is dark and angry.  As he’s watching, he sees a crackle of lightning break through the sky like a ricochet, and soon afterwards, another house-rumbling shudder of thunder. The rain hasn’t started yet, though.

He sits up on the couch, rotating his head until his neck cracks. It had been another argument last night, who slept where, an awkward conversation he’d ended quickly by sitting down on the sofa and refusing to move again. He’d said he’d be too exhausted to be uncomfortable, and he’d been right. His whole body felt heavy with that dead kind of sleep, the kind he’s only known after waking from a coma.

“Morning, Stevie,” says Bucky. He’s just behind Steve, hip cocked against the side of the couch. He’s got a coffee cup in his hand, and his hair is wet on the ends, clipped back away from his face. He’s wearing trousers but no shirt this time, though he’s got another shawl wrapped around his left side and tied over his shoulder, this one a mustard yellow. Steve uses what little awareness he has keeping his eyes on Bucky’s face.

Bucky smirks. “I forgot your hair used to do that.”

Steve scowls, flattening it down quickly. “So I guess I won’t get to see much of the city today,” he says, deciding at this second to lean into the tourist thing. He’s been a lot of places, but he’s never been a tourist before.

“It’ll probably clear out later,” Bucky says, just as thick drops of rain begin to pound the glass like their old landlord. “Why don’t you shower while I make more coffee, and we’ll figure out how to work that TV. Shuri says they get everything, and she put a lot of emphasis on that, so we should figure out what that means. Watch all the culture we’ve missed.” He takes a step back towards the kitchen and stops. He frowns at Steve. “Did you sleep with your shoes on?”

Steve had. He frowns at them, too. “I told you I was tired,” he hazards, because he doesn’t really have anything to say about it. He hadn’t thought about it.

“Well, I guess we’ll rest you up today,” Bucky says, still frowning. He turns on another light by the couch before he goes back to the kitchen. The smell of coffee is strong and wonderful, even though he’s never known Bucky to make a decent cup of coffee in his life.

Steve rises. His body feels fine, although he feels like he left his mind back in a dream. His body _always_ feels fine, even when he knows it shouldn’t. He gets ghost pains sometimes. Like an echoing sensation of a real one he knows he should have, but it’s missing. Like the smooth spots on his chest with blank bullet holes, or the worn edges on his lungs where a cough ought to be.

Before getting in the shower, he sends Sam a text asking for a movie or TV recommendation.

Three little dots pop up to show Sam is typing. Then they disappear. Then they come back. Then they disappear again.

Steve leaves him to whatever he’s working himself up to and goes to shower.

The bathroom is the only place in Bucky’s little house that isn’t modest. It’s all spacious and new and advanced, everything neat and wiped down and stocked with soap and razors and oils. A little steam still hangs in the air from Bucky’s shower, and the room smells clean with him. Guys used to make fun of them when they were growing up for being so clean all the time. Bucky had always been spruced because there was always someone he’d been trying to impress. Steve had been concerned with cleanliness because his lousy body was all he had to his name in this whole damn world, and god help him, it was going to least _look_ presentable while it worked to kill him.

Being in Bucky’s shower now, the evidence of his morning routine present everywhere, it looks likes old habits die harder than they do.

A thought occurs to him as he waits for the water temperature to set. Without thinking too hard on the idea, he turns off the lights, kicks off his boots, strips down, and climbs in.

In the large shower stall is a large, opaque window — all he can see through it is the bend of the trees surround the house, twisting and curving in the wind. The blue thunderstorm morning gives him just enough light so he isn’t blind as he cleans himself. He stands under the spray with his eyes closed. Without the yellow light behind his eyelids, with the water coming down, with the rain pelting the windows and the roof, Steve feels like he’s bathing in the storm itself. He can almost smell it — the rain, the ozone in the air, the wet soil, the bright green scent of leaves growing.

He’s been happy in Wakanda, and anxious, and exhausted. For the first time, he feels relaxed.

Until he finishes his shower, and realizes he’s walked in without any of his clean clothes.

He turns the light back on and stares sadly at his dirty, sweaty, rain-covered clothes on the floor. Then he stares at himself in the mirror for a minute, dripping. With a mantra of _stop being stupid stop being stupid_ looping around in his mind, he wraps a small towel around his hips and opens the door.

“Were you showering in the dark—” Bucky stops speaking.

Steve walks over to where he’d dropped his bag yesterday near the door, grip tight. “Uh huh,” he says, bending down swiftly to pick it up. “It’s too early for bright lights before coffee.” _Stop being stupid_.

When Bucky answers, his voice is small, distant, yet incredulous. “It’s _noon_.”

“Jet lag,” he says dumbly. He wants to see where Bucky is, where he’s looking, what his face looks like, but even more he wants to be _away,_ so he shuts himself back into the bathroom.

He’s being _stupid_. It’s just — he spent most of his life post-pubescence being this particular brand of stupid, wanting desperately for Bucky to see him while wanting nothing of the kind. Wanting desperately to see every inch of Bucky while hating himself for wanting it. But then the war happened, and he’d been strong, and it didn’t even matter, because everyone was trying to kill them all the time, and they were killing other people all the time, and they all saw each other naked, and they’d spent nights curled around each other for warmth in miserable foxholes. The Howling Commandos, Bucky included, had witnessed more than once all the major bodily functions performed by the Star-Spangled Man With A Plan, and they had performed the same bodily functions in front of the same Allied Hope, Captain America. That’s just how men in the shit operate, and in all the time, he’d had Peggy to think about, and the serum fresh in his body, and he’d been so _stupid_ to think that maybe all he’d ever needed to stop thinking about Bucky that way was a good enough distraction.

Even if that’s true, there’s nothing out here to distract them. He’s such an idiot.

None of the clothes he has are all that clean, but he manages to find a shirt that doesn’t reek, and a pair of sweatpants Natasha had insisted he carry, even though they seemed impractical, telling him he’d thank her later. He shoves his dirty clothes back in the bag and heads back out, telling himself the red in his cheeks is just leftover from the hot shower.

Bucky’s already on the couch, eyes fixed on the TV as he flicks through channels rapidly. He hands Steve the remote when he sits down and then sticks a cup of coffee under his nose.

“You pick something out,” he says, grabbing his own coffee cup. He sets his feet up on the little table in front of them, mindful of the bowl of fruit he brought out.

Steve checks his phone. Sam hasn’t responded yet. He can’t operate the remote, drink coffee, and eat something, so he puts a movie on at random and helps himself to an apple. Bucky has gotten slightly better at making coffee.

They spend an hour watching some Wakandan movie. They have no point of reference, really, considering their inexperience with film and the advancement of Wakandan technology, but Steve thinks the movie is a few decades old. Bucky speaks some Xhosa to Steve’s none, so he attempts to translate it. It seems like a version of Romeo and Juliet between two tribes, except they seem to want to resort to dancing over fighting. Bucky’s doing a piss-poor job of making the story make sense, but Steve enjoys it anyway.

Until about halfway through. “Hang on,” he says, as a main character’s father flips into the scene through a waterfall and starts monologuing. “Is that…. Is that Garando?”

“No,” Bucky says immediately. He leans forward, squinting at the screen for a long time. “Fuck. No.” He watches a little longer, as another musical number starts, starring — “Fucking _Garando_.”

“I think I understand Meka’s fascination with him now,” Steve says without thinking, watching him dance.

Bucky turns to him sharply, but then Steve’s phone vibrates.

 _“Hey Sam,_ ” Sam writes. “ _I_ _t’s me, your pal, Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America! I’m just checking in with you 24 hours ago after racing out of our hiding spot in the dead of night to literally RUN across two continents like an insane person to see my crazy best friend! I’m letting you know that I HAVENT been captured by the CIA or the UN or HYDRA or any other abbreviated terrorist fucks who would have made sure to take away my phone, making it impossible for me to contact you, which would be the only reason I would not speak to you in over a day, even though we’ve been living in each other’s pockets for almost a year because we’ve been ON THE RUN AND IN ALOT OF DANGER. I’m just letting you know I wasn’t captured and executed in a black cell!!!! There isn’t a bullet between my eyes while I’m being buried in an unmarked grave!!! I’m all good over here, how are you guys doing???”_

Steve reads it a few times to make sure he hasn’t missed the TV or movie recommendation. “ _All that time it took you to compose this,_ ” Steve responds, “ _when you could have just been answering my question."_

“Wow,” says Bucky, reading over his shoulder. “He’s such a bitch.”

“ _Bucky says hi,_ ” Steve writes.

“ _Go fuck yourself, Bucky,_ ” Sam sends back.

He shows the message to Bucky. He shrugs, and goes back to flipping through channels.

But now that Sam has brought it up, the guilt starts creeping back. He’d been thinking about what he’s doing last night, but only how it related to Bucky. And this morning, sitting on the couch in comfortable clothes, the rain outside making the inside seem even warmer, the coffee good, the fruit sweet — he hasn’t felt the need to run _once_. He’d seen it, for a little while. He’d seen exactly what Bucky had meant when he’d said he didn’t need to be fighting all the time. He’d seen the life Bucky saw for him, after all the wars were fought.

Though now, he can’t stop seeing Sam and Natasha, Wanda and Vision, Scott and Clint, out there, on the run because they chose to side with _him_ , and he gets to just _watch television._ His insides start crawling like he’s back in BT, a terrifying eagerness for something he doesn’t understand.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” he texts, but his fingers are shaking. “ _Is something wrong? Do I need to come back now?”_

 _“No!!!!”_ Sam responds immediately. Then he adds, “ _We’re good, I’m just going to kick your ass when I see you next. You’re lucky Nat talked me out of callign you because you woulda HEARD it boy. But I said my piece and now I’m good. Why are you watching stuff instead of exploring a mysterious new country? OST!!_ ”

OST means Operation Small Talk. Sam has turned it into something of a battle cry before pushing Steve into doing something he’s not going to enjoy. He tries to let out the breath he’d been holding as slowly as possible so as not to draw attention.

“I’m going to make us some soup,” Bucky says, handing Steve the remote. Then he puts his hand on Steve’s knee while he pushes himself up, and once again Steve’s holding his breath. “You’ll like my soup. It’s just like my ma used to make.”

“It better not be,” Steve mumbles, still looking at his knee. Bucky flicks the back of his ear while he passes. To Sam, he texts, “ _It’s raining._ ”

“ _Figures,_ ” Sam responds right away, clearly bored. “ _It’s hot as balls here. Clint showed up last night btw, cried when he realized he’d missed you. Now he says HE’S captain America, can you tell him how wrong he is please?”_

 _“You’re Captain America now,”_ Steve responds dutifully. The smell of cooking meat wafts from the kitchen.

Sam doesn’t say anything for a moment. Steve blankly watches the TV to stop watching his knee. He lowers the volume slightly, though, because Bucky is humming and he wants to hear it. He’s focusing on it, trying to make out the tune, when his phone vibrates again.

“ _MASH_ ,” Sam says.

 _“?”_ Steve replies.

“ _Me and Clint have conferred,_ ” Sam sends back eventually. “ _See if they have MASH. The tv show, NOT the movie. It’s about army doctors during the Korean war, but it was made during the Vietnam war. It’s funny, and not really accurate, but they get some stuff right. Like all the bureaucratic incompetence of army brass. Couple of grunts like you will enjoy it. NOT the movie.”_

 _“Thanks,_ ” Steve responds, wondering what Bucky might have been doing during the Korean War. Or the Vietnam one, for that matter.

But right now, it smells like all Bucky’s doing is frying onions, so Steve’s not going to worry about anything else.

His phone vibrates again. This message is from Natasha. “ _Send me a picture_ ,” she says.

Steve looks around the house. Photography had never been his thing, and he doesn’t think he’ll get a picture that’ll convey how warm and comfortable it is in here. So he gets up off the couch and fishes the photograph from last night out of his jacket. He holds it so there’s little glare and takes a picture of it with his phone instead, sending it off to her.

He’s smiling down at it the picture, at himself and Bucky (and Garando) grinning back up at him, when his phone shakes again.

“  _:)_ ” says Natasha.

Steve keeps smiling as he tucks his phone away. He looks at the photograph one more time before putting it back in his jacket.

Bucky’s kitchen is similar to the one he had back when SHIELD was still footing his rent. There’s a stove, a toaster, a refrigerator, a percolator, a microwave that looks just as untouched as his own. It had seemed so alien to him, back then. But now he’s seen actual aliens, and yesterday he rode a hovercraft, so he guesses people really can adjust to anything. Bucky’s kitchen looks small and homey. There are more plants in here, along the windowsill and on top of the fridge.

Nestled in a pot of ivy near the window is Bucky’s photograph from last night.

“Can I help?” he asks.

Bucky’s standing by the oven, stirring a wooden spoon in a large pot. His neck shines as he peers at Steve through the steam. “Nah,” he says. “Sam have anything interesting to say?”

Steve picks up a slice of carrot and eats it, shrugging. “Got a suggestion that doesn’t have Garando in it,” he says. Then he adds, “Clint is with them, too.”

Bucky blinks at him. “Is that the ant guy?”

“Bow and arrow guy.”

“Bet the ant guy’s more useful.”

“Clint’s good in a fight,” Steve says, because Scott may have a more powerful suit, but he’s fought beside Clint more, and that means something to him. Besides, he didn’t leave them in the middle of the fight. They had just finished one when Shuri had called him.

Bucky shrugs with his left shoulder. He stops stirring the onions, and adds the rest of the ingredients to the large pot, including browned beef, some kind of broth, potatoes, and the rest of the carrots. Steve helps him add the ingredients without asking this time.

“Thanks,” Bucky says, avoiding his gaze as he goes back to stirring. “Teji — that’s S’raz’s wife, the people I work for — she gives me food that’s already all cut and ready to cook. I can still handle a knife, y’know, just… not in a way she needs to know about.” He lowers the temperature on the pot to a simmer before covering it. “C’mon, let’s see if Sam has horrible taste in entertainment as he does in everything else.”

It takes Steve a minute to find the show — there are _so many_ in Wakanda’s catalogues, and Sam had neglected to mention the asterisks in the title. They decide not to watch them in any particular order.

He’d been worried he might not be able to follow it, his history lessons having been interrupted by aliens, and then HYDRA. But it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know much about the conflict in Korea. He knows the Army, and Sam had been right about it not being all that accurate, except for all the parts that are. He can’t say if the medical side of it is right or not, but it captures the ridiculousness of higher command perfectly. It shows the horrible combination of unbearably long, dull days of inactivity broken up by hours and days and weeks of bombings, bloodshed, and mind-numbing terror. _M*A*S*H_ has more girls in short-shorts than he remembers seeing on the bases he frequented, but some of the pranks the characters pull on each other remind him of the stupid shit Dum Dum and Jim used to do.

About an hour into watching, they pause it to get their soup, and they watch on the couch while devouring a loaf of bread between them. He and Bucky spend most of the afternoon there, even after the rain stops, laughing until they cry, then sobering up real fast when the show remembers it’s in the middle of a warzone.

“Oh, everyone knows war is Hell,” says one of the doctor characters. They’re in the operating room, up to their elbows in the blood of broken soldiers. Everyone has their faces obscured with surgical masks.

“Remember, you heard it here last,” another doctor snips.

Then the chief surgeon says, as he’s stitching someone up, “War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.”

The chaplain character is always in the operating room scenes, ready to administer last rites if necessary. He frowns at the surgeon through his own mask. “How do you figure?”

“Easy, Father,” says the surgeon, not looking up from the body he’s working on. “Tell me, who goes to Hell?”

“Sinners, I believe,” replies the chaplain.

“Exactly!” says the surgeon. “There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. But war is chock-full of them! Little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.”

Steve’s suddenly aware of his heart under his skin. It’s a phrase he could have used to describe his whole existence, before the war. _Innocent bystander._

He’s also suddenly aware of how still Bucky is beside him. Their lunches had long since disappeared, and they had started to sort of lean closer to each other as the afternoon went on, until they were almost touching. He wants to look over at him. He wants to know if he can count as an innocent bystander, when he’d practically begged for all this to happen to them. How much of stupidity can be counted as innocence before it circles back around to stupidity again?

If Steve had never gone to war, Bucky would have died for real — cold, alone, strapped to a table at the hands of mad torturers. Then he remembers he did go to war, and Bucky ended up that way anyway. Of the two of them, Bucky’s the only one you could really call innocent in all this.

Bucky’s hand covers his.

But when Steve looks over, Bucky’s still watching the show. He’s got a little furrow of concentration between his eyes, intensely focused, but Steve gets the feeling it’s more about not looking at Steve than it is paying attention to the plot.

Eventually, Bucky says, “Eyes forward, Rogers. You’re missing the best part.”

Bucky doesn't know what the best parts are, but Steve listens anyway. He doesn’t move his hand away, and neither does Bucky. Eventually, Steve picks the story back up again.

The afternoon goes on, it gets darker outside, and the rain has long stopped, but they don’t move from the sofa. Steve feels boneless, molding into the leather, and he thinks he’s dozed off a few times, but it’s hard to tell. It’s the opposite of weightlessness. He feels heavy, permanent, solidified. Bucky’s hand is warm on the back of his and it’s like the place where their skin touches has grown roots, entwining, wrapping around and growing in the earth. If Steve had any courage, he’d turn his hand over and lace their fingers together. He wouldn’t be making Bucky do all the work like this. But he knows what it means for himself, and he has no idea what it means for Bucky. So he doesn’t move.

Every so often, Bucky will ask him to adjust the volume, or rewind a part they laughed over, or skip ahead when the bombing scenes go on for too long. It’s the only time he asks Steve to do anything since he’s gotten here. Maybe this is what Bucky meant, by doing things of use that can be _good_ too, because every time he does what Bucky asks, he gets his hand squeezed just a little. Each time, Steve finds himself relaxing inch by inch. It’s sustaining.

And then someone bangs on the door.  

They both jerk upright, the remote on Steve’s lap flying to the floor. The banging doesn’t stop — its not someone with a heavy fist, asking for entrance. It’s a panicked, relentless pound of desperation.

Bucky reaches the door first, but only because he’s closer. The two of them, barefoot, Bucky without a real shirt on, but they’re never without a weapon, really. He shoots Steve a quick, serious look as he grabs the doorknob. Wakanda is safe, and hidden, and protected, and so they should be safe, hidden, and protected. There’s no reason to assume there’s a real threat on the other side of the door. Except for the fact that it’s _them_ on this side of it, and they have so many threats.

He throws open the door, keeping his grip tight on it, so he can use it to shield himself if necessary.

Standing outside, in the remaining drizzle, are two children. Steve recognizes them from yesterday as some of the kids playing by the creek on their walk to dinner. They’re wet and muddy, their faces fearful.

“Nceda!” the older girl cries, eyes on Bucky.

“What?” Bucky’s still tense, but it’s a different kind. Like when Steve used to have a long, painful coughing fit, not like when Steve used to charge into battle. “What — uh, intoni? What happened?”

The two kids start speaking quickly in Xhosi, the younger boy bouncing up and down and pointing behind the girl. Neither of them seem concerned when Bucky begs, “Christ, slow down, slo— _kuphuza_ , for Chrissakes —”

The girl grabs Bucky’s hand and tugs. “Masihambe!”

“Fuck,” says Bucky, not moving.

“What is it?” Steve asks, and the girl finally looks at him, angry and upset.

“They were out playing in the rain,” Bucky says, frowning. “Some trees fell over and now her brother is trapped. I’ll call —”

“Where?” Steve asks the girl.

She says nothing to him, but the little boy points at the path he and Bucky had walked down yesterday, so that’s the direction Steve runs in.

“Steve!” Bucky calls after him, just as he crashes through the treeline. He runs down the path, which seems a lot narrower today, trees whipping his face and neck as he goes. He scans the surrounding area, trying to listen over the rustling leaves, the rush of the rain-filled river, the clicks and shrieks of insects waking up for the night, the sound of his own panting.

A young voice cries out behind him, and he stops running. But it’s only the young girl running after him. She doesn’t even pause, or look out of breath, when she grabs Steve’s arm as she passes and pulls him in the right direction.

He would have spotted it eventually. The fallen tree is massive, about five stories tall and thick all the way around. It lies parallel to the path, having knocked over a few other trees on its way down. The bark still smoulders where the lightning had struck it, but fortunately everything is too wet for a forest fire to start.

The girl drags him to her brother, along the middle of the tree. The ground dips slightly here, which is the only reason he’d survived. Otherwise, the tree would have completely crushed him. As it is, he’s tucked into a shallow divot of earth, the trunk leaving no space apart from a small crevice through which to breathe. He’d been trying to dig himself out, but too many thick roots block the way. He can only get one hand out.

She lets go of Steve when she sees her brother waving. She cries out and runs to him, and clutches his hand to her chest, speaking rapidly.

Steve surveys the scene quickly. He has nothing to dig the boy out. Other thick, permanent-looking trees on all sides prevent it from just being rolled aside. The only way it can move is up.

He joins the siblings on the ground. “Can he move?” he asks the sister.

Steve has traveled to many interesting places where they speak languages he doesn’t know, so he’s gotten pretty good at reading facial expressions. So that’s why when she girl stares at him incredulously for a moment before going into a large tirade in Xhosi and slapping the side of the tree, Steve can tell she’s saying, _Not with this fucking tree in the way, you idiot._

“If I,” Steve says, tapping his chest, “lift this up,” he mimes the tree rising with both hands, “can he,” he points to her brother’s hand, “walk out?” which he gestures with two fingers. “Is he injured?” He doesn’t know how to mimic that, so he just says it slowly.

The girl still looks incredulous, but she asks her brother, her eyes never leaving Steve’s. The brother says something back, and the girl nods at Steve.

“Okay,” says Steve. “Okay. Tell him to lie _flat_ , and be ready.”

She seems to understand, because she nods, says something to her brother before letting go of his hand and stepping back.

It’s not exactly a helicopter. But to be honest, Steve hardly remembers even doing that. He definitely doesn't remember  _thinking_ about doing it. There had been no other thoughts in his head besides getting to Bucky.

After he’d done that, he’d felt a pain all throughout his muscles he hadn’t known since Howard Stark stuck him in a tube and flipped a switch.

A tree is not a helicopter. A tree, fortunately, doesn’t have an engine actively trying to get away from him. If he can do _that_ , he could move a tree.

The only problem is, the helicopter at least had a handy place to _grip_ , as did the building. His whole palms had been blistered beyond belief afterwards, but that had been all.

The bark immediately starts to dig into his hands as he struggles to find a good place to grip underneath the tree. The ground is soft and unsteady under his feet, and he sinks a little instead of the tree going up when he first starts to push. He adjusts his stance, bracing against a thick root, and tries to tighten his grip as best he can.

And then, he begins to lift.

He can feel the same pull in his biceps as with the helicopter, as the tree fights against gravity. Inch by inch, he pushes up, his fingernails digging into the wood to keep his hold. He’s got it about a foot off the ground when he feels his skin split open. The branches at the top must be caught with some other trees, because suddenly it feels like he’s fighting with a whole forest, and the huge tree doesn’t want to lift any higher.

He can see out the corner of his eye the girl rushing forward to grab her brother’s hand. Steve wants to tell them to stop but he can’t. The space still isn’t wide enough for the boy to crawl through, though he is trying and she’s pulling, and they need to _stop_ because he feels his foot start to shift again and if he drops it _now_ it’s going to crush the boy’s head so he can’t drop it, and it might be rain or it might be blood or it might be ants but something is crawling down his wrists on both sides, and he _pushes_ and the tree goes up another half-inch and sticks again and the root beneath his foot bends from the damp and —

And then another hand joins his. He can’t look, but it’s all he needs to push past whatever is holding the tree down, and they’re able to get it just high enough for the boy to slip out. He crawls out on his belly, then on hands and knees as he lurches into his sister’s arms.

“On three?” Bucky asks breathlessly.

“On _one_ ,” Steve says, teeth clenched, before dropping the tree with a sickening thud. He stumbles back, but Bucky is there already, hand around his waist to catch him.

“Fuck,” he says. “Your hands, Steve.”

“It’s fine,” says Steve, not even looking. He can already feel the itch beneath his skin as it starts to slowly heal. He doesn’t move away from Bucky, though. He arms are _killing_ him.

The two kids are still on the ground. The boy looks like he could be a couple years older, but he looks so much smaller as his sister cradles his back. She’s looking at them both with wide eyes. The littlest brother is standing a few paces behind, staring at Steve with his mouth agape.

“Is everyone okay?” he asks them.

The girl nods, looking down at Steve’s hands. Steve doesn’t.

“Well, then get home,” Bucky says. “And don’t fucking play in the middle of a thunderstorm anymore, Jesus.”

“We used to do that,” Steve says, after the kids have run home and they’re trudging up the path. Bucky’s still got his arm around Steve to support him. “Do you remember? When we were really little, before we knew how sick it got me.”

“I remember,” says Bucky. “You were the only kid in Brooklyn who could catch a chill in August. And that’s when you used to go out in _shoes_ , you dummy.”

The house is in sight, and Steve finally looks down. His hands and forearms are caked with blood and dirt, as are his feet. He hadn’t even noticed he’d forgotten his shoes, but now that he knows it, he feels every stone and stick stabbing the soft pads of his feet.

“I lost some fingernails,” he says, turning his hands over.

“Yeah?” Bucky asks. He has to let go of Steve to let them into the house, but Steve stays leaning on him, and his arm goes right back once the door is opened. “How many?”

“Four.”

“Ha, got you beat. I’ve lost five.”

“That’s hilarious.”

Bucky leads them to the bathroom, using his left shoulder to knock the door open. “You’ll be cleaning up all the shit you’re tracking in later, by the way.”

“I’m a guest,” Steve says.

“A lousy one,” says Bucky. “Look at the mess you’re making on my goddamn floors. Sit down.”

Steve gently sets himself down on the toilet seat while Bucky slaps on the light and busies himself going back and forth between the towel closet and the sink. He keeps his hands resting on his thighs, trying to be still even as he feels himself healing. He hates watching it happen. Not that he isn’t grateful as all hell that his body is able to do this, but it almost feels like a mockery of everything he endured beforehand. Like the years he spent unable to do this very well on his own never even happened. His awful body and his suffering were all he ever had, growing up in this world. He isn’t sure anything’s changed about that.

Bucky kneels down in front of him, wet cloth in hand, and begins to clean his feet.

Steve wants to tell him to stop, to insist he can do it himself, that he can really just jump in the shower again, it’d be faster, but Bucky rests Steve’s left foot on his thigh, and softly rubs the dirt off the vulnerable arch, and instead what he says is, “You were asking me to stay, yesterday at dinner. Weren’t you?”

Bucky looks up at him. His hair had come loose from his pins, and his face is shiny with sweat and humidity. A single streak of mud curves above his cheekbone. His eyes are clean and bright. “Yeah, Steve. I was.” He turns back to Steve’s foot again, running the towel firmly between his toes. Steve can’t stop the twitch he makes, but Bucky smiles at it. “I’m not going to ask you again, though. I know you can’t.”

Steve’s foot is pale and new in Bucky’s hand. Without the dirt, he can see it’s all superficial scratches, liable to be gone by midnight. Bucky switches to the other foot, flipping the towel over to the cleaner side.

He’s filthy and aching and too warm, but the cleanliness of his feet makes his soul feel softer. He watches the top of Bucky’s head and asks, “Why not?”

Bucky snorts, scrubbing at his ankle. “Come on, Rogers. Running after that kid like that? You don’t know how to turn it off.”

“What was I supposed to do?” He isn’t angry. He genuinely wants to know.

Bucky stands. Steve’s feet are cool and pink. Bucky dumps the dirty towel in the sink and grabs a clean one, getting it wet. “If you hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have been able to lift that tree. Not with one hand. Those kids didn’t _expect_ me to, I’m just a nearby adult who might have an idea what to do. That’s all kids need, most of the time. If you hadn’t been here, I would have called the right people, and then gone out there to wait for them and make sure no one was in any immediate danger.” He comes back over, cold water dripping from the cloth to the floor. “That’s why people have people, Steve. It’s why people have been living in communities since the start of mankind. Your problem has _always_ been, since we first met, that you think you’re your own village. That you’re all alone out here. Give me your hand.”

It takes Steve a moment to lift his right one and give it to him. His palm looks like hamburger meat, the tips of his index and middle finger sticky with blood. It hurts more when he looks at it, when Bucky lifts it higher and Steve has to hold it up himself while he starts gently, gently, _gently_ rubbing him clean. So he keeps staring up at Bucky, who is watching his hand with intense concentration.

“I don’t want to be,” Steve says softly.

Bucky’s hand stills on him, eyes moving to meet his. The crease between his eyes disappears. “I know,” he says, equally soft. “I think you’re figuring it all out, but you will. And I’ll be here, when you do. ‘Til the end of the line, right, pal? You’re just a lot slower than me.”

“Am not.”

“We can race when your feet are better,” says Bucky, going back to Steve’s hand. There are two great big gashes on Steve’s palm, splitting down right over the lines, but they already look like the injury had happened a day or two ago. He should really stop Bucky now, as he starts wiping down Steve’s arm up to his elbow. He even opens his mouth to do so, but Bucky interrupts him by saying, “Shut the fuck up, Stevie.” So he does.

Bucky starts cleaning his other hand. The fingers without fingernails look strange, like they’re made of clay, and they hurt more than his palms. He can’t remember ever losing a fingernail before and he has no idea how they’ll look growing back. He can’t imagine it’ll feel good, though. When Bucky finishes up, he tosses the dirty towels away and grabs some clean bandages from beneath the sink.

“I’ll heal up in a bit,” Steve protests. “You don’t have to —”

“Hey,” says Bucky. “You know what else I remember?”

“What?”

“Me telling you to shut the fuck up just now.”

Steve lets Bucky work in silence, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Bucky manages to wrap the bandages around his palm with a dexterous combination of teeth and fingers, pressing Steve’s thumb down to keep things in place every once in awhile. He’s slow, careful, making sure he doesn’t hurt Steve anymore than he has to, his face furrowed in concentration. Steve finds himself shivering under Bucky’s focus and he doesn’t know why. It’s all too _much_ all of a sudden — whenever Bucky used to manhandle him with an arm around his shoulders or a hand on his elbow, he’d have to shuffle out from under him, unable to take it for too long. But Bucky has been touching him all _day_ and maybe this is what it means to grow old. Steve _feels_ old, in a wonderful way because he never thought he’d ever get the chance. Which is why he’s able to let himself fall forward, just a little, until his face is pressed into Bucky’s chest.

He can, literally, feel Bucky stop breathing.

Steve’s face is warm, and he’s half up against Bucky’s shawl, the cloth soft and cool under his cheek. The other part of his face is on bare skin, and Bucky hasn’t moved, hasn’t even twitched, except when Steve sighs, closing his eyes. He feels Bucky let go of his bandaged hand, but nothing else. Steve shifts his face an inch until his mouth is fully against Bucky’s chest. He can smell Bucky better now, and his whole self aches in a new way. He feels like he could run across another continent again with ease, but he also feels like he could fall asleep comfortably on Bucky’s chest and rest for another few decades. He does neither, instead sighs again without thinking — this time, leaving his mouth open to press his lips right over Bucky’s heart.

A hand touches the back of his head. It just rests there, fingers curling into his hair. They curl tighter when Steve presses another open kiss to Bucky’s chest.

“Hell,” Bucky says shakily, thumb brushing behind Steve’s ear. “I think we’re both the slowest motherfuckers on the planet.”

“‘M not slow,” Steve murmurs, moving up to kiss the hollow of Bucky’s throat for the first time after eighty years of wanting to. But he isn’t lying. For all that he’s yearned to touch him, he thinks if Bucky had tried to take care of him like this when he’d been 16, 20, 25-years old, he would have more than likely socked Bucky in the jaw. He’d wanted to touch, but he hadn’t be ready for anyone to touch him in return.

He doesn’t want to be a village of one anymore.

So when Bucky pulls Steve back, tilts his face up and leans down to kiss him, Steve follows his lead.

The throb in his hands and feet spreads like a fever at the first touch of Bucky’s tongue against his. His whole body becomes one large, soft heartbeat. He grips Bucky’s hip tight, mindless of his bandages, needing something to hold onto when Bucky moans low into his mouth.

Bucky’s face is flushed when he finally pulls back, but his eyes are dark and sharp as he inspects Steve’s face. Whatever he sees there — and Steve can’t even begin to know what— makes him smile.

“You know,” he says, still rubbing behind Steve’s ear. “I gotta admit something to you. Whenever I pictured us doing this over the years, I always imagined it with you sitting on the can.”

“For _Christ’s sakes_ ,” Steve growls, leaping off the toilet seat and pulling Bucky in, because Bucky is a jackass but he’s a jackass who _has thought of kissing Steve_ and is kissing him back now, despite the shit-eating grin on his face.

Steve has never done _this_ right. He’s never done it for real. It’s the one area of his life he’s half-assed. It was always something he told himself he would focus on later, that there were more important things than feeling another person’s body flushed against his, more important things than having someone up against a wall, more important things than riding a thigh between his legs. For the life of him now, he can’t remember what any of them are.

“Fuck, Bucky,” he hisses, as Bucky moves lower down to bite his neck. For all their talk about going slow, it suddenly seems like they’re going a mile a minute. “Can we — _god_ — I’m not an — expert at all this, but —”

Bucky rubs their cheeks together, nuzzling wetly on his ear, which for some reason makes all of Steve’s nerve endings stand at attention. “That’s okay,” he says soothingly. “I know you’re not, me — me neither, I’m not — fuck, we’ll figure it out, _fuck_ , you feel so _good_ , Stevie.”

Steve knows his face is flushed red, and he’s harder than he’s maybe ever been before, but still, he rolls his eyes. He grabs Bucky by the jaw and pushes him off an inch. “Thanks for the confidence boost, Barnes,” he says, “but what I was trying to say was, I’m no expert but shouldn’t we move this to the bedroom?”

Bucky blinks slowly at him before narrowing his eyes. “Punk,” he says, then bites Steve’s bottom lip and sliding away from the wall. “Come on then, hotshot.”

Steve follows him out the bathroom, clumsily stripping out of his dirty t-shirt and dropping it off the couch. He can’t believe it was only this morning he’d felt like an idiot wandering around in a towel in front of Bucky, but now he’s never felt so eager for anything else. He wants Bucky to see him.

Except when he steps into Bucky’s room for the first time, for a moment he forgets all about what’s happening. Because suddenly, they’re outside again.

Only not. Two of the walls are made of glass from top to bottom, as is the ceiling. They look out onto the lush forest behind the house, with the trees canopying above. Thick purple rain clouds hang heavy in the sky like a promise for tomorrow, but between them are splashes of stars starting to come out for the night.

“They’re one-way windows,” Bucky says quietly. “No one can see in. It just makes me feel less like I’m sleeping in a box.”

The single lamp in the corner burns yellow. Bucky’s standing over by his bed, neatly made with perfect military corners. While Steve had been gaping at the sudden scenery, Bucky had removed the shawl. He sees the perfect cut of his stomach before he sees any of the scars, stretching out from his left shoulder over his chest like fractured glass. He’s angling his body away from the light so the end of his left arm is still shadowed, but Steve doesn’t think he realizes he’s doing it.

In two steps Steve is over to him, wrapping his arms around his back and kissing him thoroughly. It had felt natural when, moments after he’d received the serum, he’d been racing across across Brooklyn, leaping over cars and fences, dodging bullets, and punching submarines. It had all been instinct — freshly gained, but instinct all the same. It feels like that now. Once he knows he _can_ do something, there’s nothing else he needs to think about.

But he does pause as Bucky sinks onto the bed and, with one fluid movement, inches up to the top while pushing his pants down and off. He’s moved into the light now. Steve pauses. He stares. He’s fine to stay in this pause for eternity.

Especially when the longer Steve takes in Bucky’s thighs, his scars, his cock, his skin — the pinker Bucky gets. The harder he gets, also. “C’mon, Steve. Get it in gear already.”

Steve gets one knee on the bed, and then forces himself to take another pause. He doesn’t want to but he has to ask, “Do you think we should, y’know… _talk_ about anything first?”

Bucky sits up. Gently, he takes Steve by the wrist. “I promised myself, when I first started remembering who I am, that I would never, ever try to kill you ever again. Don’t make me break my promises, Rogers.”

Between two bandaged hands and one fine one, they manage to get Steve naked, and Steve silently sends a thanks to Natasha for her sweatpants suggestion. As soon as they’re kicked off his ankles onto the floor, Bucky uses his legs to roll them over, and then he’s on top of Steve, the full weight of him pressing down _everywhere_ in a way Steve has never experienced before. He feels covered and hot and so completely safe, even if, past Bucky, he can see the full breadth of an open night sky.

But then Bucky kisses him again, palming at his chest and sliding his thigh once more between Steve’s legs, and then he’s seeing a completely different constellation of stars.

There’s nothing Steve wants to do but touch Bucky, but his hands are still throbbing from his injuries. He’d be able to ignore the pain, but the bandages make his movements awkward and the sensation dulled. He’s about to tear them off when Bucky stops him, sitting up in his lap.

“I want to _feel_ you,” he complains. He feels wild and and exposed and he’s ready to start ripping off the bandages with his teeth.

“We have time,” Bucky says softly, running his hand up over Steve’s throat. His fingertips brush Steve’s bottom lip. “There’s no rush. And fortunately, this hand knows how to work overtime.”

Steve tilts his head and takes two of Bucky’s fingers in his mouth. It’s all instinct again, and this new, thick weight on his tongue feels just as right as punching out a nazi did the first time. Even more so the way it makes Bucky’s hips jerk forward and his eyelashes flutter. He moves his fingers in and out a few times, Steve moaning all the while, before he pulls them out and covers Steve’s mouth with his palm.

“Get it wet, Steve,” he says, bending low over him. “ _Fuck_ , yes, that feels so _good_.”

Let it never be said that Steve doesn’t know how to follow orders, as long as it’s an order he agrees with. He runs his tongue over Bucky’s hand until it’s dripping with spit, tracing the lines on his palm, nipping at the fleshy pad beneath his thumb.

All the while their hips have been moving idly against each other, but when Bucky’s hand is wet enough, he wrenches it away from his mouth and kisses him instead. Blindly, he lines their cocks up and grips them together. He traces his calloused fingers along the hot, soft line of Steve’s cock for the first time, almost reverently.

Steve would be embarrassed by the sound he makes if it hadn’t been swallowed by Bucky. He rocks his hips up to meet him, and he may not be able to use his hands for much, but he can clutch Bucky’s ass closer, encouraging him to thrust harder and faster. It’s sloppy and uncoordinated and overwhelming and it’s the best thing Steve has ever felt in his entire fucking life.

Bucky won’t stop kissing him either, even with every gasp and goan and half-uttered curse. Their mouths are just open and pressed together, breathing in each other’s exhaled names like drowning men seeking their last breaths.

“ _God_ , Bucky, I’m —” He draws up his knees to bring him closer. It makes it harder for Bucky’s hand to move over them, but he’s really just holding them together while they grind into each other. But the movement presses Bucky down heavier onto him just as Bucky sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and Steve comes with a shuddering cry, his vision blurring so the colors of the stars and Bucky’s eyes melt together into something he’s never seen before.

Now the space between them is even slicker and Bucky groans heavily, the pace of his strokes and hips stuttering as he keeps moving with Steve. It’s too much stimulation for him and he writhes beneath him, utterly overwhelmed but never wanting it to stop. He squeezes Bucky’s ass one more time and then Bucky comes too, his gasped, “ _Steve!_ ” pouring down Steve’s throat. Then he collapses on top of him, face pressing into his neck.

They hold each other, trying to breathe right again, and Steve can’t tell if it’s himself trembling or Bucky or both. They shake and cling to each other like the leaves on the trees around them, staying close together in a peace between one thunderstorm and the next.

Eventually, Bucky inches off Steve. He goes on his left side, so his arm is still wrapped around Steve’s chest and he isn’t far from his neck. Now Steve can see all of the world around them, but he turns his head to look at Bucky instead.

“Are we supposed to talk now?” he asks, voice rough. He’s completely happy to take Bucky’s lead on the subject.

“Ugh,” says Bucky, closing his eyes and burrowing into Steve a little more. He sighs, and Steve feels it in his armpit and all the way down his side, making him twitch. Then he feels Bucky’s smile on his skin.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Steve tells him, because he can’t remember if he’s said it yet. “I’m glad you’re alright. No, don’t make the joke, I know.”

Bucky pouts, lowering his right hand. Then it turns into a real frown as he leans up to look at Steve. “I’m not, y’know. I’m not — better. I don’t know why Shuri told you that.”

Steve blinks. “What do you mean? I thought —”

“The triggers are gone,” Bucky says. “She pulled them out, I don’t know how. But I’m not. I’m not better, Steve. I don’t sleep, and when I do it’s nothing but nightmares. I remember _everything_ , and sometimes I remember it like a real awful thing I’ve read in a book a long time ago, and sometimes it’s like I can still smell the gunpowder in my nose and feel the blood on my skin. I don’t think I’ll trust myself ever again, and I definitely don’t trust myself to be safe around you. I don’t even trust myself with two fucking arms. I’m not better. I don’t think I can be.”

“You can.” Steve brushes the hair out of his face and then holds his head with one. “You are. Just because you aren’t the _same_ doesn’t mean you aren’t better. You — water your plants and sweep your floors, and you have jokes with your neighbors and kids know they’re safe to knock on your door looking for help. You’re _better_.”

Bucky opens his mouth to protest, but Steve interrupts him. “And I’m not… I’m not okay either. You know that. You can see it better than anyone, you always have.” His heart races in his chest again, but this time Bucky’s hand is on his chest, giving it something to rest on. “We’re not the same as we once were and we’re not okay, but we’re _better_ , and I think we’re better… like this. I think I am, anyway. Even with everything that’s happened to us, all the things we’ve done and become, I think we still fit together pretty good. I don’t know what that is, if not better.”

Bucky looks at him for a long time before smiling. It’s a little sad, but then he kisses Steve, and that’s not sad at all. “You’ve gotten real good at your motivational speeches, pal,” he says, lying back down on Steve’s shoulder. “Are we done with all the talking now?”

“You got it,” Steve says, wrapping his arm around Bucky’s back. He closes his eyes.

It’s muted from the walls, but Steve can still hear the rustle of the wind through the trees, the midnight creatures stirring on their evening hunts, the insects singing to one another, the swollen river rushing through Wakanda like blood to the heart. And over it all, Bucky’s breathing, right into his ear.

Then Steve says, “Ow.”

Bucky looks up again. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” says Steve. “I just think my fingernails are starting to grow back.”

Bucky huffs. “You’re a real sweet talker, y’know that, Rogers?”

 

* * *

 

The next day, Steve finally finds the broom. It’s hiding beside the refrigerator.

They’d spent most of last night discovering each other from every angle, with new avenues of exploration opening up as another one of Steve’s injuries healed enough. They slept in late — or rather, Bucky had. Steve had awoken to another storm, but this one happening all around him outside Bucky’s windows. It had been amazing to watch, but then his attention kept being drawn back to Bucky, curled up at his side.

Fast asleep, Steve could see the exhaustion on Bucky’s face, the evidence of all the things that haunted him clear as anything without him being able to hide them. All Steve could do was clutch him tighter and listen to the rain.

But he seemed to have slept soundly last night, and woke up with a smile and a hard-on, which Steve is infinitely more adept at dealing with, now. They’d stayed in bed for awhile, and then they’d showered together. And now Bucky is in the shower alone, wanting to actually get clean this time.

So Steve is cleaning up.

The dishes from yesterday had been left out because of the kids’ arrival, and his dirty clothes were littered all over the house. But Steve doesn’t feel massively guilty while straightening up. Just a regular, normal amount of guilt. He feels good.

He’s only wearing a pair of Bucky’s linen trousers, which are a little tighter in the leg but just as comfortable as his sweatpants, which need a good wash. He starts sweeping the dirt they’d tracked in yesterday into a pile. He might even be whistling, but there are no witnesses around to prove it.

He opens the door to sweep everything out, and there is T’Challa, arm raised to knock, looking very surprised. They stare at each other.

He lowers his hand awkwardly. “Captain Rogers.”

Steve slowly leans the broom on the wall. “Your Highness.”

T’Challa smiles. He looks tired, but just barely. He’s still pretty immaculate, right down to his shoes, which somehow don’t even have mud on them, despite the morning rainstorm. The skies have cleared up, though. The sun threatens to shine. “How about if I call you Steve if you call me T’Challa?”

“It’s a deal. Come in, mind the — pile.”

T’Challa steps over the dirt easily. They can hear the sound of the shower running, so he doesn’t ask about Bucky. “I apologize for not being able to greet you before now. It’s been a very busy time for us here.”

Steve nods. “It’s fine. You’ve have many boring and kingly duties to attend to, I’ve heard.”

“Very true,” T’Challa says with a grin. “But please don’t tell Shuri I said so. Opening up Wakanda had seemed very simple in theory. If only there was a way to only let the countries with intelligent leaders know of our existence.”

“With all due respect,” Steve says honestly, “that would leave very, very, _very_ few countries to deal with.”

“Okoye made the same remark,” says T’Challa, “with much less respect.” He looks around the little house, still smiling pleasantly. “Are you finding your stay comfortable? I must admit, when we invited you, I’d intended to offer up the royal household for your stay. We have plenty of room, and I didn’t think there was much here for you to be comfortable.”

“Oh, that’s —” Steve feels himself go bright red, suddenly horribly aware of his bare chest. “That… okay. I’m quite — comfortable here. No need to… worry about. My comfort.”

T’Challa stares at his red face for a quiet moment, during which time, unfortunately, the shower pointedly turns off. Then, he smiles.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he says, amused. “Anyway, I came down to see if you were doing well, but also to invite you both to the marketplace tonight. We are preparing to celebrate your national holiday. Everyone is very excited.”

Steve freezes. “Our what?”

“Your national holiday?” T’Challa frowns. “It’s your Independence Day, didn’t you realize? We have prepare—”

“No! Sh—” Steve bites his tongue to keep from shushing T’Challa, but he stops speaking anyway, eyes wide. “I’m sorry,” Steve says lowly, quickly, looking back over his shoulder at the closed bathroom door. “We just — don’t need to celebrate that. It’s not really a big deal. I mean, it is for some people, but not for us. Please.”

T’Challa raises his eyebrows. “My mother insisted,” he says. “She said, if _she_ were a guest of royalty in a foreign country during a time of _her_ nation’s independence holiday — if we had one — and her hosts ignored it, she would feel terribly insulted.”

“Really, “ says Steve desperately. “There’s no need —”

“No need for what?” Bucky says.

Fortunately, Bucky had the sense not to come out naked, in all likelihood having heard Steve and T’Challa speaking. He’s wearing the same outfit as yesterday, this time back to the blue shawl. His wet hair is plastered to the back of his neck, pushed all the way away from his face, and it still startles Steve, to see all of him again. He nods towards T’Challa. “Your Majesty.”

“Sergeant Barnes.” T’Challa doesn’t correct him, but he does smile at Bucky. “Steve was just telling me how neither of you celebrate your Independence Day.”

“ _What?_ That’s _today?”_

Steve closes his eyes.

“Y...es?” T’Challa now sounds very confused. “So you do celebrate it?”

“What? No.” Bucky sounds closer now. Steve opens his eyes to find him glaring at him. “But July 4th is Steve’s birthday.”

“Oh!” says T’Challa, looking genuinely pleased, despite Steve’s abject misery. “That’s even better. How old are you turning, Steve?”

Steve grimaces. “Ninety-nine. Technically.”

T’Challa blinks. Then he says, “That a special year for many of our elders. There’s even a song we sing…” He trails off at the look of horror spreading across Steve’s face. “...but I’ll make sure we skip it.”

“Please,” Steve begs. “I’m not really a fan of parties, especially when I’m the focus.”

“It’ll be fine,” T’Challa says, heading for the door. “It’ll only be us and the people of Wakanda. I’ll have someone come collect you when the celebrations begin, just before nightfall.” He lets himself out, but before he closes the door behind him, he turns back to them. He looks back and forth between Steve and Bucky, and smiles. “Happy Birthday, Captain Rogers.”

The silence, once he’s gone, is deafening.

“So, I actively avoid looking at calendars,” says Bucky, hand on his hip, “after discovering I had been semi-conscious and committing atrocities in fits over the course of the last century. What’s _your_ excuse, pal?”

“I was busy,” Steve says, picking up the broom again. He focuses only on his pile of dirt, sweeping weakly. “There’s been other stuff going on.”

Birthdays before the serum used to be small, unexciting affairs. It had always been a miracle he even made it to the next one, and they all knew it, which is depressing and there’s no way around it. They’d celebrate with a little token gift he’d feel guilty for accepting when it could have been a meal, or a ticket to see a picture in the evening. During the war, they’d be so pleased to see another day that anyone’s birthday became a shared, bittersweet celebration of life. When he’d woken up again, birthdays had just seemed like the world’s longest joke, with a punchline forever out of earshot.

Bucky puts his hand over Steve’s, stopping the sweeping. Steve looks up.

“Ninety-nine, huh?” Bucky’s smile is slow and crooked. “I wonder if there’s anything we could do ninety-nine times before your party. If you’re not too slow about it, of course.”

Steve lets the broom clatter to the floor. “I’m not slow,” he says, pulling Bucky in.

They’re late for the party. Steve couldn't find his boots anywhere.

Fortunately, T’Challa hadn’t been lying. It’s just them and the people of Wakanda, so it’s more of a street fair than a party. Several bands play in different areas throughout the marketplace, and the air is filled with the scent of flowers and spices. They weave through the crowds to get to where the T’Challa and his family are holding court on a balcony above it all. Meka finds them as they pass her restaurant, and she gives them both a hug and pinches their cheeks before pushing them on their way. Most of the people seem to know they’re now celebrating a white man’s birthday, so they wish Bucky a happy one as often as they do Steve.

At one point, a group of children — and these are _different_ children then then the ones they saw playing by the house — see Bucky and point and jump up and down and howl at him like a wolf.

“Are you ever going to explain that to me?” Steve asks.

“Nope,” says Bucky, waving to the kids.

They make it to T’Challa, and everyone wishes Steve a quick and relatively painless happy birthday, even Okoye. Their hands are filled with food and drink, and T’Challa says they’re getting some fireworks ready just on the edge of the marketplace.

“I can’t believe there’s no clouds,” says Bucky, looking up at the bright starry sky. “Do you guys have like a weather-controlling machine lying around or something?”

“I’m working on it,” Shuri says idly.

They’re watching a group of dancers just below the balcony when Steve’s cell phone vibrates. Sam has sent him a video. It takes him a moment to find a quiet spot to watch it.

 _“Steve!”_ Sam’s face fills the screen. Wherever he is, it’s dark and dusty, and he’s in his suit, although his glasses aren’t on. He’s grinning wildly. “ _Happy Birthday, man! I bet you were hoping I forgot, but man, you_ know _I don’t forget your cliched, star-spangled banner ass. I hope you’re enjoying Wakanda, even if you have to spend it in the rain with that asshole. Hey!_ ”

He turns the camera around. Steve can see they’re in a small, shelled-out apartment. An orange light filters through two square windows. Natasha is beside one of them, face turned away as a hail of bullets comes through. She waits patiently for them to stop, guns raised. Once they do, she looks at the camera. Her frown disappears for a moment, and she says sincerely, “ _Happy Birthday, Steve._ ” Then she pivots to the window, guns blazing.

Sam turns the camera a little bit, and there’s Clint. He’s firing off arrow after arrow, back to Sam.

“ _Hey!_ ” Sam yells. “ _Hawkeye! Hey!_ ”

Clint turns around, aggrieved. He’s got an arrow in his quiver, with a red, blinking light on the end. _“What! ”_

_“Say Happy Birthday to Steve!”_

_"What?”_

_“Hap— happy Birthday!”_ More gunshots, and then something explodes outside the room, showering Clint with dust.

_“I can’t hear you!”_

_“Say—_ ” The camera shakes like he’s gesturing hard with the camera. _“Say Happy Birthday! Like we talked about, man!_ ”

Clint’s still frowning, and the red light on his arrow starts blinking faster. He lets it fly while still staring at Sam, and a second later, there’s another explosion. Then, everything outside is quiet.

 _“Man_ ,” says Clint to the camera. _“Ninety-nine is way too old for you to be celebrating birthdays, Steve._ ”

Sam turns the camera back to himself, shaking his head. _“These kids have no respect for the old folks. Anyway, here’s our present to you, Steve — a whooole bunch of dead terrorists! Happy Birthday!_ ” He lowers his goggles, and Steve can hear the sound of his wings opening up. _“Enjoy some of that birthday cake for me, and I hope to see you soon, brother!_ ” The camera cuts out just as Sam’s about to take off.

Steve realizes he’s grinning, and he can’t stop. He waits for the worry to settle in his heart again, but it doesn’t come. They’re fine. Whatever it is they’re doing, they’re doing it fine.

“Is everything alright?” T’Challa asks mildly, finding him under the platform. “That sounded dangerous.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, putting his phone away. “They’re good. They’re just doing what we do.”

T’Challa nods, suddenly somber. They start walking back to the stairs that lead up to their family and friends, when T’Challa stops him.

“I have a — friend,” he starts, but the word makes him grimace. “She’s a lot like you, in many ways. Even though I wish she would stay here with me, where it’s safer, she has to go out into the world. She has to help people, and she won’t be able to rest if she knows she’s not doing everything she can. It frustrates me, mostly because I know exactly why she’s doing it. Because it’s the part of her that makes me love her in the first place. As a King, my kingdom is like my body, and I must protect it by being with it, so she must go and I must stay behind. We both understand it, for as much pain as it causes us.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. The music pauses for a moment, and above them, he can hear people talking. And suddenly, he can hear Bucky laughing.

“I know one day, she’ll come home, and be content to stay home,” T’Challa continues, looking away. Then he says, “I _hope_ so, anyway. All I can really do is try to make this a home she would want to come back to, one that will be worthy of her, one she’ll be happy to keep protecting. But I don’t know if she sees it that way. I know she loves Wakanda, but I don’t even know if she truly thinks of us when she’s out there, or if she’s just thinking of her mission. I want her to be focused, and be safe, but I like to think the thought of us helps her, too.”

“It does,” Steve says. “It helps. It more than helps.” He swallows around the dryness in his throat. “It’s the only thing that does, really.”

T’Challa smiles with relief. “That’s good to hear.” They start up the steps. “So we will continue to keep her home safe, and keep it growing strong, until she is ready.”

Steve nods. It takes him a moment to say anything, and then all he can say is, “I’m sure she appreciates it.”

“Is everything okay?” Bucky asks, coming over to him. He’s wearing Shuri’s crown, though it sits askew on his head. “I couldn’t find you.”

“Everything’s fine.” And Steve takes Bucky by the hand, because it’s his birthday. “Come on, I think the fireworks are starting soon.”

They go over to the rail, a little way from everyone. They lean on it, watching the sky, which for now is empty of anything but stars.

Steve says, “Do you remember going to watch them go off over the East River?”

“I remember,” says Bucky. “It’s not so much fun without the threat of watching someone lose a limb from all the gunpowder.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention that part,” Steve admits. “You remember when Dickie Rosenberg lost most of the fingers on his right hand from those firecrackers because he’d been dared to throw them at whatever car passed next on Bedford Ave? Only he didn’t know they’d blocked off the road for the parade.”

“I remember,” says Bucky again. “He lost the love of his life that day.” And then he makes a rude gesture with his hand.

Steve grins, his whole body shivering at those two little words. “Hey, you remember—” But then the show starts. It’s a dazzling, technologically-advanced light show, the regular fireworks combined with ones shaped like people and birds and ships and, of course, a giant purple panther that races across the heavens, much to the cheers of all the onlookers. There are many ones of bright red, white, and blue in honor of the reason they’re celebrating, but that’s the only thing American about it. Streaking comet and fizzling spiders flash against the stars, the barrage deafening and beautiful and jaw-dropping.

Steve watches, and keeps watching as Bucky rests his chin on his shoulder. “I remember,” he whispers into Steve’s ear, barely audible over the bangs. “I remember your heart used to leap every time one went off.” He slides his hand under Steve’s shirt until his palm is flat in the center of his chest, just as the sky suddenly fills with a loud streak of silvery-blue fire. “Just like that.”

* * *

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] tezeta (nostalgia)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15423291) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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